It's time for the show to begin
Entering 2024, what is the big attraction of the game industry on the product side? I think Tencent and NetEase's Spring Festival war on party games must be on the list. At the same time, what is the most popular and potential emerging track in the industry? I think there is no need to say much about the imagination of mini games.
Now, there has been an unexpected and reasonable collision between the two key directions of the industry. Just yesterday (January 2), the author found that the mini-game version of "Yuanmeng Star" has rushed to the first place on the WeChat mini-game popularity list. Outside the main battlefield on the App, the party game battle has started on the second battlefield.
Making money is not the goal, precipitating the chain of social relationships
To be honest, before rushing to the top of the list, the volume of the "Metadream Star" mini-game was not strong, and many people didn't even know that there was a version of the mini-game in Yuanmeng. In fact, the competition learned that the version of the Yuanmeng WeChat mini game has been in preparation since the middle of 2023, and will be launched together with the App version on December 15. In addition, its cloud gaming version of Tencent Pioneer was also launched on the same day.
However, unlike the app, we have not seen large-scale purchases of games in mini games and cloud games. In the actual experience, the author found that the "Yuan Dream Star" mini game has been connected to the Android side, but it has not been launched on the iOS side for the time being, but this does not prevent it from becoming popular among small gamers. In addition, the official community of Yuanmeng Star, "Xingbao Grass Notes", has launched a WeChat mini-program, which is currently being used by 10,000+ players.
Let's take a look at NetEase, "Egg Boy Party" has not yet launched the WeChat mini game version, but the cloud game version of the official server and various channel servers has already been launched on the NetEase cloud game platform, and players can quickly enter through Douyin live broadcast to achieve the experience of playing while watching the live broadcast.
In addition, in the WeChat mini program, NetEase has also launched two mini programs, "Egg Boy Party Eggshell" and "Egg Boy Party Welfare Station", as well as "Egg Boy Party Message Egg" and "Egg Boy Island Preserved Egg" service accounts.
Among them, the eggshell and the welfare station are integrated in the official public account of "NetEase Egg Boy Party". The former is positioned as a player community, and it has built a social window for users to communicate, share, and play together with NetEase Dashen. The latter mainly provides trading services for physical blind boxes. At present, the total number of comments on the two Mini Programs has exceeded 570,000.
The official official account also provides two major functions: "Online Play" and "Eggy Game Hall", through which players can realize cloud trial games on some maps, as well as experience mini-games such as synthesis, elimination, and stacking.
As for the "Egg Boy Party News Egg" and "Egg Boy Island Preserved Egg", there is no push message at present, and it seems that it has not been put into use yet. However, judging from the introduction, preserved eggs mainly involve UGC co-creation, and message eggs allow players to view messages sent by friends in the game in WeChat.
As a large DAU product with 500 million players, "Egg Boy Party" is a stepping stone for NetEase in the social relationship of players, shouldering the expectation of opening up online and offline social scenes. So far, the results have been quite significant, and the author has met many egg players who have gathered together in my life, and these players will become the user pool of all NetEase's game products.
In fact, it can already be found so far that "Yuan Dream Star" is making efforts on the small game side, and it is definitely not to make money. The light gameplay is aimed at lighter players, and the business model of "pass + affordable fashion" also determines the low ARPU value of party games. At this stage, the Yuan Dream Star is making efforts in the mini-game, and there must be other plans.
Therefore, in the author's opinion, the precipitation of one's own player's social relationship chain may be the main purpose of "Yuanmeng Star". After all, in the special period of the Spring Festival, when relatives and friends gather and offline social needs are full, the version of the mini game that can be played on the spot may become a powerful tool for social circle-breaking.
Thunder took the lead and sent WeChat mini-games directly
Tencent, NetEase and other major manufacturers have made efforts in mini games, which also reflects the amazing potential of mini games in user acquisition. In fact, Tencent emphasized in last year's Q2 earnings call that the overlap between Mini Games and Tencent mobile game users is less than 50%, and the gender is mostly female, which will help Tencent Games continue to gain new users.
This situation is not unique to Tencent, and it is universal. For example, when Sanqi Mutual Entertainment released the App and Mini Game versions of "Little Ant Country", it was also found that the exposure and repetition rate of the two did not exceed 50%, and the Mini Game could reach more potential game users, and the conversion link was shorter. This feature has also attracted many leading manufacturers to get involved.
At present, the first choice for leading manufacturers with a certain scale is to port existing games from apps to mini games. The idea behind it is roughly the same as that of mobile games in the early days of mobile games, through these forms that are closer to users and have a shorter conversion path, in order to acquire a wider range of new users at lower prices.
Among the manufacturers, Sanqi Mutual Entertainment can be said to be the pioneer representative of "hands turning small". After gaining insight into the trend of interoperability of traffic platforms, Sanqi Mutual Entertainment quickly followed up and successively released a number of medium and heavy type mini games such as "Call Me the Big Shopkeeper", "Little Ant Country", "Soul Master Duel of Douluo Continent", "Soul Prologue" and so on. "Seeking the Way", which has long topped the best-selling list of WeChat mini games, is also distributed by Sanqi Mutual Entertainment.
In addition, Sanqi Mutual Entertainment also publicly stated that the company has reserved a variety of themes, original mini-games with different painting styles and gameplay, including ancient business simulation management, pan-feminine, mild MMO & idle leisure, classic RPG development, Three Kingdoms, Q version of oriental fantasy, or App games.
Being able to set up a native mini game shows that Sanqi Mutual Entertainment is optimistic about this track. However, in this regard, Thunder Mutual Entertainment was the first to eat crabs.
At present, the outstanding "hand-to-small" products on the market are mainly based on simple operation and value-oriented placement, card and elimination in terms of gameplay. Thunder Games, which are good at this genre, have become the first manufacturers to eat dividends with the mini-game version of "One Thought Away". After the success of "One Thought Away", Thunder launched an idle game called "The Brave and the Equipment" in August of the year.
Different from the previous release order of App first and then Mini Games, "Brave and Equipped" chose WeChat Mini Games as the first launch platform, and has not yet released an App version. Gigabit also said in the financial report that if "The Brave and the Equipment" achieves good results, Thunder is likely to use the mini-game platform as the first choice for the release of reserve games.
However, the performance of "The Brave and the Equipment" after its launch can only be said to be decent, and after increasing the purchase investment on last year's National Day, the game entered the TOP50 of the WeChat mini game best-selling list for the first time on October 20. But as of press time, the game is no longer in the top 100 best-selling list.
Although Thunder's first attempt was not a blockbuster, there are still native mini-games from small teams such as "Chivalrous Dream" and "Modified Operations", which have achieved outstanding market performance. At the same time, considering the market size of 20 billion yuan and the growth rate of 300%, the author believes that more and more large manufacturers will use mini games as the first platform in the future.
What does multi-terminal issuance mean?
In fact, because of the growth ability of Mini Games on the user side, multi-terminal publishing is becoming a top-down trend of change in the industry, which also makes Mini Games invisibly exert their own influence on the game industry. In the short term, the biggest impact on multi-terminal issuance may be the buying side.
According to the "2023 Domestic Game Effect Advertising White Paper" released by DataEye, the number of WeChat mini games in 2023 will exceed 15,000, with a growth rate of 63%, and it is expected that the number of games in investment will continue to grow in 2024, but the growth rate may drop slightly.
In addition, in 2023, the amount of deduplicated materials for mini games will increase by 7 times year-on-year. The reason behind it is first of all the increase in the number of participants, the number of products and manufacturers entering the market has surged, and the head and shoulders manufacturers in Beijing and South China are the main force to launch. Secondly, mini games are mostly aimed at casual users, the CPA price is low, and the material consumption is fast, so it is necessary to invest more materials to ensure the delivery effect.
For mini-games with light gameplay and low retention conversion, the purchase volume is an important factor affecting the success of the game. The author once mentioned in the article "Revealing the Guangzhou Gang, the Behind-the-Scenes Promoter of the Explosive Mini Game", in addition to the above-mentioned Sanqi Mutual Entertainment and Thunder Mutual Entertainment, with Guangzhou Forgame Holdings as the core, involving the Forgame system of Weidong Network, Feiyin Games, and Jieyou Software, as well as the Junhai system with Junhai Games as the core, involving manufacturers such as Dalan Network, Zhangkun Technology, and Honor Network, have all entered the game. In the market, excellent products such as "Qingyun Jue's Demon Suppression" and "Phoenix Scheming" have a lot of origins.
If we enter a longer stage, the rise of mini games may also affect the distribution of products with different positioning in the future. In fact, we can already clearly feel that the siphon effect of the head products on the category track is constantly strengthening, such as the king for MOBA, the reverse water for MMO, and Genshin Impact for the second dimension.
Under the siphon of their users and the occupation of time, the living space of small and medium-sized products is constantly compressed. How to survive and where to break through is a practical problem in front of these manufacturers. Therefore, when mini games become a viable path, more and more small and medium-sized teams will shift their focus to them. When it is transmitted to the product side, there is a possibility of "enrichment at both ends and peace in the middle".
To put it simply, there are a few large-scale head products in the track that occupy the majority share of the App side, and they are constantly fighting with each other. At the same time, there are also a large number of products in the small game side to share a larger user cake, and the competition intensity is also not low. On the contrary, it is in the middle volume range, which is guarded by some products with stable users, and it is difficult to go up, but it is also difficult for new products to come in and get a piece of the pie, and the competition is the most peaceful.
Of course, this is most likely just a conjecture. However, as large manufacturers have successively deployed apps and mini games, the trend of manufacturers deploying mini games in the future has been clear. Perhaps in 2024, we will have the opportunity to see more heavyweight products with double-ended publishing on the game publishing side, and we will also be able to see more different publishing styles.